“Sound of Falling,” Mascha Schilinski’s often lovely and occasionally disturbing look at German girlhood across generations, is set on a rambling farmstead over four time periods: the early 1900s, the end of World War II, Cold War-era East Germany and the present day. Long and detour-heavy, the film moves among these eras. Clothing modernizes and lighting transforms from candelabras to kerosene lamps to flashlights. But the more things change, the more certain experiences stay the same, and Schilinski uses her static setting to amplify echoes within and beyond the 20th century.
The film begins in the second time frame with an overture: Erika (Lea Drinda), an adolescent, ties up one of her legs and maneuvers down a hallway on crutches. After the game, she returns the wooden supports to the bedroom of her sleeping Uncle Fritz (Martin Rother), an amputee, and discreetly tastes the sweat gathered in his navel. She then hurries outside, where a farmhand slaps her across the face. In only a few minutes, with almost no dialogue, Schilinski establishes a mesmerizing world of feminine mischief and libido, transgression and abuse.
From here, the movie goes into temporal free fall, intercutting vignettes from each period by slipping into the point of view of various young women. The movement rarely causes confusion — we usually know where we are — as much as it builds a texture of blurred memories and fluid chronology, of the future molding itself to the shape of the past and vice versa. Any movie with “sound” in the title is just about begging for you to take it as a listening experience, and within discrete scenes, the film uses ambient noise and sonic design to anchor us in time. The camera roves, but the buzz of farm flies or clanking of silverware insists on the present tense.
The opening sequence gives way to the 1910s, with the 7-year-old Alma (Hanna Heckt) frolicking about the grounds alongside her sisters. Her blond braids slung in twin halos over her ears, Alma is hyper-attuned to the moods of her mother, Emma (Susanne Wuest), whose glowering mien suggests a constitution hardened by misfortune.
Through Alma’s eyes, the farmstead is a fortress of feminine mysteries. Some of those mysteries, like how the maid, Trudi (Luzia Oppermann), soothes Alma’s convalescent brother, Fritz (played here by Filip Schnack), by “stroking his center,” as Alma describes in a voice-over, may be investigated by spying through keyholes. Others, like the source of her mother’s gagging fits and sudden-onset paraplegia, defy understanding.
But the home is also steeped in death. In an early scene, Alma and her sisters wear black for All Souls’ Day, and she wonders about an afterlife while studying daguerreotypes of deceased ancestors. Later, Alma witnesses death up close. That theme eventually extends to Alma’s counterparts in more recent periods, Angelika (Lena Urzendowsky), a flirty teenager in the 1980s, and Nelly (Zoë Baier), a somber 5-year-old in the present day. In parallel scenes, each girl envisions taking her own life.
The line between danger and girlhood has been traced and retraced in cinema, which positions “Sound of Falling” within a lineage as established as the one it portrays. As the girls — especially Angelika, who enjoys provocation — struggle to make sense of adulthood’s promise and menace, they might bring to mind another clan of haunted young women: the Lisbon sisters of Sofia Coppola’s “The Virgin Suicides.” That coming-of-age tragedy is told from the perspective of neighborhood boys, and Coppola honors that vantage point by keeping her subjects at a distance.
Schilinski employs a similar technique, to uneasy effect. As much as we study the girls of the farm, noting their habits and kindred spirits, something stands in the way. It feels like a gauzy aloofness, an insistent aestheticism that grows uncomfortable, particularly when it turns toward the theme of youthful suicide. Here is a movie whose atavistic excursion through time transfixes, even as its psychology remains as fuzzy as a photograph smeared by motion.
Sound of Falling Not rated. In German, with subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 35 minutes. In theaters.
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